Until the early twentieth century, people who wrote grammar books tended
to use terms like "phrase" and "clause" rather unsystematically -- they
were descriptive labels, but not precisely defined ones. The way the
terms are used in U.S. K-12 education is the result of a consensus that
developed among educators on this side of the Atlantic, but it's not a
universal consensus. A good many Commonwealth grammarians (for example,
many in the Systemics approach, but certainly not limited to it), use
"group" for what most Statesiders would call a phrase (basically, any
phrase that all of us would view as endocentric is a "group," but an
arguably-exocentric constituent without a predicate is a "phrase," with
the prepositional phrase being the prime example). Similarly, the
requirement that a clause have a subject and finite verb is part of the
consensus that developed here, but not elsewhere.

I like to view gerunds, infinitives, etc. as kinds of *predicates* --
but that's based on an approach in which the clause has three, rather
than two, major constituents: subject, finite marker, and predicate. I
derived that from SFL, but there are analogues in other modern
approaches and there are certainly historical precedents for that
tripartite division. It's not part of the K-12 consensus, though, such
that it is, so I don't harp on it much in my pedagogic grammar classes.

Bill Spruiell
Dept. of English
Central Michigan University

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